Electronic devices have permeated virtually all aspects of modern life. These electronic devices can be embedded in products such as telephones, kitchen appliances, televisions, automobiles, and many other products that require controls, displays, or information storage in small devices or spaces.
Electronic devices require integrated circuits contained within chips or die to perform various functions for the products we use. As these products include more features or become smaller, the demands for packaging the integrated circuits become increasingly difficult to achieve.
The reduction in size of the circuitry has not been able to keep pace with these demands. This has caused larger integrated circuits as well as combining multiple integrated circuits within a single integrate circuit package. The integrated circuits can be arrayed, stacked, or both.
Stacking integrated circuits or modules with integrated circuits require significant spacing for electrical connections to other components within a package or to the base package itself. The increased spacing results in a significantly larger height or z-dimension of the overall package.
Many attempts have failed to control this “roof” height. In some attempts, electrical connectors are exposed resulting in poor reliability or failures due in part to damage. In other attempts in which the electrical connectors are covered damage can still occur during assemble due in part to assembling components with close spacing to other components.
Attempts to avoid damage due to close spacing have resulted in the overall package dimensions to grow. Often a spacer is inserted to protect electrical connectors resulting in both larger dimensions and unusable area within the package.
Thus, a need still remains for improving packaging density while maintaining reliability, yield, and manufacturing throughput to improve features, performance and control costs in systems for integrated circuit packages.
In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems.
Additionally, the need to save costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures, adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.